_Chaldaeans_.--Until the last half century historians were
accustomed to look back upon the Greeks, who led the world from the
fifth to the third century B.C., as the pioneers of art, literature,
and science. But the excavations and researches of later years make us
more ready to grant that in science as in art the Greeks only
developed what they derived from the Egyptians, Babylonians, and
Assyrians. The Greek historians said as much, in fact; and modern
commentators used to attribute the assertion to undue modesty. Since,
however, the records of the libraries have been unearthed it has been
recognised that the Babylonians were in no way inferior in the matter
of original scientific investigation to other races of the same era.

The Chaldaeans, being the most ancient Babylonians, held the same
station and dignity in the State as did the priests in Egypt, and
spent all their time in the study of philosophy and astronomy, and the
arts of divination and astrology. They held that the world of which we
have a conception is an eternal world without any beginning or ending,
in which all things are ordered by rules supported by a divine
providence, and that the heavenly bodies do not move by chance, nor by
their own will, but by the determinate will and appointment of the
gods. They recorded these movements, but mainly in the hope of tracing
the will of the gods in mundane affairs. Ptolemy (about 130 A.D.)
made use of Babylonian eclipses in the eighth century B.C. for
improving his solar and lunar tables.

Fragments of a library at Agade have been preserved at Nineveh, from
which we learn that the star-charts were even then divided into
constellations, which were known by the names which they bear to this
day, and that the signs of the zodiac were used for determining the
courses of the sun, moon, and of the five planets Mercury, Venus,